Distributional Structure

4 Distributional relations

1. How does Harris distinguish who from ordinary nouns distributionally?
   Under eliciting, the verbs after “The pianist who —” are much the same as after “The pianist —”, and so for every noun: the verb selection of who equals that of the preceding noun, a mark of pronominal elements.
   • Harris, 1954, Distributional Structure (Word), §4, pp. 161–162
2. How does distribution reveal the active–passive relation?
   Sentences with a transitive verb (“The kids broke that window last week”) can be elicited with the passive morpheme, the nouns inverted and the rest unchanged (“That window was broken by the kids last week”). Inversion without the passive mostly fails (“The movie saw the kids”), and tense changes keep the nouns but not the rest of the sentence.
   • Harris, 1954, Distributional Structure (Word), §4, p. 162
3. How does Harris define the head of a construction distributionally?
   If A occurs in environment X, and AB does too, but B does not, then A is the head of AB. Notions like “subject” and “object” are semantic names for distributional positions.
   • Harris, 1954, Distributional Structure (Word), §4, p. 162